Wednesday, October 28, 2015

"Stuff" Originally published in the Florida Weekly Newspaper the week of October 22-28, 2015. It was my entry to a writing contest.

I didn't win, but they published the entry in the paper.

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Stuff

He
stooped over, a reaction he immediately countered by quickly
straightening up and slowly looking around. Everyone was busy
researching computer data bases or involved in their scanners. No one
paid attention to him. He stood on the staircase, confused by the
diversity of the items carefully, almost lovingly, laid on the wooden
steps that led up to the second floor. The items up there were being
indexed by Orom's team. The two team's members did not interfere with
each other as even the stair case had been politically divided into a
lower half and an upper half. One of Orom's specialists, a female
from the domestic anthropological research team worked several meters
above him. She glanced at him, he could see her eyes shimmering
through the clear environmentally secure face mask, but they did not
communicate.

DonTel
returned his attention to the items below him, His first scan had
returned a positive on an item known as a “Doll,” laid a single
increment above a vessel made of natural, woven material that
ingeniously incorporated a carrying handle into its design. The
contents of the basket confused him. They were obviously used to
facilitate eating, but they were much smaller than the ones found
earlier in the main food preparation area. InfoBase reported the
items might be used for training the young, but they doubted the
offspring used such an incomplete set of vessels as the actual
utensils for nourishment. InfoBase had no idea how the white
container next to it integrated into the scenario. The closest item
in the data base was a fragile, oddly shaped device used to display
flowers instead of containing a food stuff. That did not fit known
parameters, especially since his diagnostic scan indicated the vessel
was created roughly within the same time frame as the doll.

How
did they select which food to eat and which ones to display, he
mused. He once again focused on the doll, dressed quite differently
from what the electronic media intercepts had led them to expect.
The garment covering the doll held his stare, it was actually quite
beautiful.

A
light glinted to his right, from above, on the stair case. The female
above him slowly pointed to another basket laying on the step below
her. The basket was bigger than the one with the miniature food
serving vessels. His scanner displayed “Sewing kit” as he focused
on the basket that was daringly not in his authority to index. He
felt his metabolism increase. It was the first time he interacted
with a female member of the investigation team since they had entered
earth orbit. He simply hadn't had the opportunity. The preparation
for the on-earth probe had been intense and no time was wasted on
anything but the task at hand. He looked up at her and stared
directly into her dark eyes. She turned away to again look down at
the artifacts. Her ID tag was orange-orange–green. He would look
her up at the debriefing after they returned to the on-board
laboratory.

He
scrolled through the data on the sewing kit. It was a collection of
components used to manually assembly clothing. He had seen such items
during his in-depth holographic training, but this was his first
encounter with the real thing. The female of the human species
actually manipulated their five-digit extensions on the end of each
arm to fasten different pieces of fabric together with a continuous
filament of some sort to adorn themselves, and, oh, for warmth, he
remembered.

He
stared at the doll with new interest. Obviously, it didn't need to be
kept warm, yet it was cloaked in one such manually assembled garment
of shimmering blue. Cautiously he glanced around. His counterpart
working above him again gave no sign of his presence, but she slowly
turned her head to watch as he slowly stooped over and allowed his
scanner to envelop the doll with its reddish force field. The doll
was instantly recreated over three hundred kilometers away exactly as
the scanner read it, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. His vision
became intense and narrowly focused. He wanted more than to scan the
doll, he wanted to touch it. He wanted to pick it up and hold it, an
absolute disobeyal of orders! Under no circumstances were there to be
any indication of their presence! Nothing was to be moved, or even
touched. There would be no history, no clue to their visit. To
disobey the order meant immediate removal from the exploration
program. Nothing would be tolerated that would jeopardize the voyage.
Betraying their presence on earth was a breach that could possibly
end the entire visit, much less the data collection process.

The
rules didn't encompass his desire. He was so excited he was afraid
his vital signs would flag him for security monitoring. He couldn't
contain his emotions as he shut off the scanner and slowly extended
his upper left extremity, hovering just beside the doll. He paused,
and as soon as the scan field completely collapsed, slipped his
multi-jointed appendage under the doll and slowly lifted it off the
stair case. The dolls eyes mechanically opened as he tilted the doll
toward him and from inside the fabric and ceramic creature a bellows
collapsed and the doll said quite clearly, “Ma ma.”

His
analysis team responded immediately. Every probe team member's visor
filled with red alarm warnings and the emergency recall was initiated
before DonTel could look up. Both entire teams of twenty were gone
within seconds.

Balanchine
waited an hour before crawling out from behind the window curtains.
She sat on the window sill anytime she wanted privacy from the humans
who noisily dominated the house. She slowly crept to the edge of the
stair case and laid down, tail twitching nervously. The strange
energy was gone, except for a faint, strange odor that her owners
would never detect. She cautiously sniffed the air and listened for
any sound, her ears twitching and turning. The dog downstairs had
slept through the entire probe, not even barking at the doll's
unexpected call. Only a cat would know they were gone. Only a cat
would know they were even there.